Flatfingers wrote:It's funny; we often talk about this game or that considered to have "bad" voice acting, or so-bad-it's-good-in-a-way voice acting (Two Worlds). And we sometimes mention games that we think have unusually good voice acting (Bastion, Portal).

What's the difference? That is, what makes one game sound amateurish and immersion-breaking, while another game's characters speak exactly like the people we imagine they are?

Is it just a matter of paying for professionals who do a lot of voice work and have access to high-powered recording studios? Or is there something more to getting voice acting that enhances rather than breaks immersion?

How would you apply that "something" to choosing voice actors for background chatter in Limit Theory?

I personally think the greatest difficulty for LT to have good voice acting is that as it is now (or was when we last saw it), it is so abstracted. There's no actual way of "knowing" just what sorts of beings the players are. Are they human? aliens? robotic?

If we added voices, that would almost certainly speak entirely in english, it would completely remove that open interpretation of the game. No matter how good the voice actors were, no matter the quality of it's production, filling space with English chatter would like looking at Schrodinger's cat, turn all of space into human territory and remove all other options.

The sole exception to this would be a "Ship's computer", but even that would have severe limitations given the truly infinite scope of LT. It could never read off all the names of the systems, players, stations, planets, etc. It would be limited to things like "Cargo bay 90% full" or "Docking complete" or "Target locked" or "Jumping in 3...2...1...Jump". The bland minutiae; it could never give the game character as in Bastion or Portal, could very likely never even use proper nouns.

As I said, in an ideal world, where voice synthesis could say anything in a thousand voices and languages and still sound good, where like pareidolic icons, genuinely meaningful but unintelligible-until-learned patterns of alien chatter could be produced... yes, I'd say add voices and chatter. Until then, I don't think it would do more good than harm to immersion.

When you're trying to fill an infinite multiverse, if you're not willing to consider the entire creative output of humanity as a starting point, you're wasting your time.
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